So i am in the process of really developing my characters and i have decided that it would be easier and better for me to take characters from other stories i have read, films i have seen, anime i have watched and just use them as inspiration for my own characters. I find that by doing this, my characters are more diverse and interesting, but i don't do this for every character tho as i like to make some up on the spot. One of my characters is a dramatic and romantic stereotype of a French or Italian guy you would see in those romance movies. The type who does bally and wears a bit too much lip gloss, who talks about romance and has a rose in his mouth with guitar music playing in the background, the one who gets all the ladies and is sexy as a buffet. This character was inspired by Yuri on Ice!! (Ill let you guess which one) and i'm using him as more of a comic relief character, for now, but he has a very dark story and is a somewhat morally grey character. (Also inspired by the black swan film) Hopefully your ideas can help inspire me, as i'm due to kill off some of my own characters soon.
The majority of my inspiration comes from people I know in real life. Everything else is my own ideas for the character. There are certainly ways that other authors inspire me but I don't want to be accused of stealing their ideas.
Ah fair enough, although i didn't know you could be accused of stealing characters as long as they don't share the same name and attributes you know. Iv'e seen plenty of shared character tropes and styles through out various genres.
These days, I would suspect that writers use characters they see on TV/film as much as real people they know (or see) for inspiration... as long as you alter them enough to make them your own (or combine them with other inspirations), and do it well, I don't see a problem....
If the story is only going to be put on an on-line fan-site, then it's probably not a problem. If this is a story you want to see published however, then do your best to keep away from complete character lifts and renaming. In either case, I'd say start with an attribute of the character you like. You could even piece them together from other characters, real or imagined, and then go from there. That way the character can still be your creation and still have that unique quality that attracted you to it.
I think our favorite characters get in ALL our heads...we can't help but be inspired by them. This is super random but I loved loved Henry in 100 Cupboards. His nervousness, his 12-year-old-boyishness, the way he looked at a problem, "Mentally shrugged," and left it. I think Henry has snuck into a few of my characters....
Yeah. Character from other works have definitely inspired some of my own. So has setting and story arcs too. I don't see this as stealing. If you directly recreated the character, that would be stealing, but consuming another work and creating something brand new out of it, adding your own voice is being creative with what inspires you. It's also how tropes got started. I think some of the greatest works of art were inspired by the art of others. You'll also find this in music. A lot of song writers take inspiration from other songs because they can hear a new sound in a beat or melody that already exists. It's amazing to create new art from past art.
A lot of my inspiration comes from a variety of different media, genres, and characters. The character from my avatar is the main character for the graphic novel I'm working on, and she is partially inspired by the Zora from The Legend of Zelda series of games, or, more specifically, Lulu and Princess Ruto. That being said, I can be inspired by nearly anything I fancy. I might read or hear a quote or poem that really catches my attention, or see a shape or color, and find some way to apply that to my characters.
Ya all the time. Lots of stories have great characters but boring other stuff. It would be more of a crime not to give those characters a fun setting to play around in. Look at Bella from Twilight for example. A misunderstood teen girl with a cool dad. The setting is normal middle America infested with spooky paranormal creatures. Sure, it has potential. The sales that those stories garnered prove that much. Yet when you actually read the plot and stuff you see that it's just kind of a basic love triangle with weird stuff thrown in for kicks. What if Bella, her cool dad, Edward, the werewolf guy and Dream (Dream, from the sandman series of comics, one of the most powerful of the endless) got mixed up in the world of corporate espionage and had to work though their differences to get the job done for their client, Coca-Cola. Now that's a compelling plot that can have more layers of complexity then just a simple love triangle. That's just how I see things though.
Inspiration comes from experience, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes I can trace a character or their attributes back to a source. Sometimes I intentionally create a character from specific experiences. Other times, I come with up an idea, and I know it's based on something I've seen or heard somewhere, but I couldn't tell you where. As others have pointed out, as long as you're not plagiarizing characters from their sources, it's fine. As for my favorite inspirations, it really depends on what project I've got going on. Alice Walsh was obviously inspired by Alice in Wonderland, as well as Katniss Everdeen. Her sister, Annie Walsh, was inspired by people I know, including a romance author I've had the pleasure of meeting at a conference several times (I'd rather not say who). The antagonistic Queen Heart was inspired by the villain in Stay Alive, as well as Jigsaw from the SAW franchise. As for Jester, he was inspired a great deal by myself, back when he was little more than wish fulfillment. As the character grew, he took on attributes of Malcolm Reynolds, Shepherd Book, Jayne Cobb, and Tyler Durden. His love interest, Blair, is probably my most "original" character, though her look was inspired by actress MeKenna Melvin. Her father, Padre MacDougall, was inspired by Stephen Lang, as well as my mentor. His godson, Tommy Watson, was inspired by John Watson (of the original Sherlock stories), as well as Jeff Bosley and Tom Selleck. Jester's friend, Brian, was inspired by a blacksmith friend of mine. If my characters start to feel too much like another character out there from someone else, I throw a curve ball at my characters. I blew Jester up, made him an orphan, and shot his first love interest through the head before he learned to behave. Padre was much more cooperative, but I still had to murder half his family and his best friend. The Walsh sisters are probably my most cooperative characters, along with Cheshire (who is a combination of the 1954 cartoon character and V from V for Vendetta).
When you look at characters in other works you should think about them as an archetype, more so than as an actual character. I think you should be coming up with the entirety of your own characters; they need to mean something to you personally and breathe like a real person. But it's absolutely fine to think "I want her to be a Sarah Conner type character" as you are thinking about your story, just to give yourself of an idea what kinda of role and function you want them to have in the story. That way you have some conception of how they might act just as you brainstorm the plot without needing to know all the backstory for them so you can focus on that aspect of the book for right now. But I think that when you get into actually writing the thing you need to forget that and make them their own character who exists and makes sense on their own terms. It's ok to discuss characters in short hand; "She's this character with this character"; but within the context of the book you can't just let your character be someone else's. Not because it's copying, but because it's bad writing. Your characters need to really mean something to you, they need a spark of you in them. It doesn't matter how much you love someone else's characters they aren't yours and you won't be able to write them as well as someone that strikes a chord with you that you can take in any direction you want. The best writing comes from exactly that, from having characters that you can grow from the ground up, can make them really have a complete and unique sense of self, even if they are in an archetype that others have done. By being truly unique they are much more interesting, both to write and to read. Your take on a type of character is always going to be better written than someone elses take on it that you're borrowing because you like the character.
Well said, @LostThePlot. It helps to think of my characters as a mix of other characters, but in the end we have to make characters our own. They're going to be with us for the long haul, and good writing requires us to pull from ourselves to create something only we can say. I've seen a lot of bad indie movies that pull near carbon copies of characters from other stories, and it just comes across as cheap, lazy storytelling. One in particular was a knockoff of Hitman, down to the barcode on the back of his head. It was like watching a worse movie than Hitman was, and it cheapened the experience.
Indeed, and the process of writing a character should be a journey of discovery for both the writer and the reader. It should be a process of finding out how this guy fits together and what specifically drives him and how he came to be who he is and where he is and why is he doing this. The revelations about him should feel as big to you as you come up with them as they are supposed to be to the reader. And when you come up with ideas yourself, well, you are always going to be pulling from you and what you know and what makes sense to you and tinged with your world view. It is important for any work (and the characters within it) to be trying to say something in a way that is unique to you. That doesn't mean they have to be startlingly original, and it's ok to be just writing a fun action story much like many others before but you need to be telling it well and you need to be telling it the way you want to tell it. Same for your characters. It's not a requirement to be saying something no-one else has ever said, but it is a requirement to say it the way you want to say it in a way that has specific meaning to you.
For sure. I don't really think of it in terms of "Okay, I'll take this character and put it into my story." Most of the times I realize after the fact that I have a character that is similar in personality to a character from another book. If there is something that's a bit too similar I'll change it, but most of the times they're their own character that just fall into a certain archetype.
I never do this intentionally, but it has certainly happened that I write characters that resemble one I have been reading about. For example, after reading Joe Abercrombie and getting acquainted with Nicomo Cosca, I "just happened" to write an old-ish, self-serving, alcoholic mercenary captain who has a certain way with words. They're not the same character, but I can see the template I applied and I know where it's from. Whenever this happens I take away some traits, add new ones from elsewhere, turn the intensity of those traits up or down, tweak and fiddle, and soon enough I have a character that resembles the original only in summary, if that. This is the exception rather than the rule. Most of my characters, as far as I can tell, are fragments of dozens of unrelated sources. The ones that I give any depth to, anyways. My short story actors tend to be modestly endowed in terms of dimension. Also, far more than other fictional folk, I base my characters around people I know and people I've met. Just as bits and pieces, mind you; a trait or two from this fellow, a handful of foibles from that lady, a sprinkle of What's His Face's singular speech pattern. Add Dude Guy Sr.'s beard, tweak and fiddle, and you're good to go. The rest, I find, tends to fall into place naturally over the course of writing.
Hm. I like cutting myself up to make my characters. There are lots of aspects to my personality - I figured if you took my personality and cut it into little pieces, I could make a variety of very different people... And so I did. Sometimes I like to write down certain mannerisms or things I've said that made me laugh - or not - to save for my characters. The way I write is I need a way to emphasize with my characters otherwise I simply can't get them. I have to become them, in a way. I call it "hacking into their minds" but.. Still using my mind. So I'll take my experiences and reactions to things and twist them into their reactions to entirely different things. My non-existent brother may have not been slaughtered before my eyes, but I still know how to make that experience feel real to me by putting it into experiences that I have encountered. I don't think I ever go out and directly say "yep, you'll be like this person." I just like to make little collages from all sorts of people... Non of my characters resemble one person on purpose.
I am astonished at how easy it is to lose sight of this. Imposter syndrome is awfully sneaky like that; it's hard to write deliberately when you still fear that your ideas aren't as good as you think they are. I may have a redheaded goofball sidekick character who keeps stalling out on the page because i'm too busy comparing him to Ron Weasley. i suppose the most important thing is to maintain that awareness throughout the process. it's fine to spark your characters with ones you see in tv/movies/books, but be wary of the line between the character you pull from and the character you're shaping.
Confidence is a genuine problem with characters, especially when you are second guessing yourself as to how this will read to other people. Really all you can do is have faith that you can make this something good and that whatever similarities there might be they aren't intentional and you are still telling your own story in your own way. But that's hard, you know? Because it's so easy to be self-critical and to know what stories it's kinda similar to and just start feeling like you're writing crap. In the end none of us can really know until other people read our work how good it really is. But if that's the case, so be it. Just try to forgo criticism and write your story the way you want it and leave it until tomorrow to find out if you're treading on toes or whatever.
it's funny you say that, because i recently read an article that really hit the point home for me; all the time i spend hemming and hawing and wondering and worrying is time i could be using to write. it's funny because we all tell one another to shut up and write in one way or another, but this particular approach found its mark with me because i know i'm so notoriously bad about thinking instead of doing. it's liberating to let go of all those worries, particularly when i know it serves a purpose: to get out of my own way. i can't help chuckling though, because it's so obvious. i just needed it to be presented to me in the right way.
